Shell Cheatsheet - tar / zip

tar

• x: extract
• z: compress archive using gzip program
• j: bzip2
• c: create archive
• v: verbose
• f: archive file name

.tar

No compression.

# Create
$ tar -cvf archive_name.tar directory_to_compress

# Extract the archive
$ tar -xvf archive_name.tar.gz

# Extract the files to a different directory
$ tar -xvf archive_name.tar -C /tmp/extract_here/

.tar.gz

# Create and compress
$ tar -cvzf archive_name.tar.gz directory_to_compress

# Decompress and extract
$ tar -xvzf archive_name.tar.gz

# Extract the files to a different directory:
$ tar -xvzf archive_name.tar.gz -C /tmp/extract_here/

.tar.bz2

# Create
$ tar -jcvf archive_name.tar.bz2 directory_to_compress

# Extract
$ tar -jxvf archive_name.tar.bz2 -C /tmp/extract_here/

pigz

pigz is a parallel version of gzip. Although it only uses a single thread for decompression, it starts 3 additional threads for reading, writing, and check calculation.

$ pigz -dc archive.tar.gz | tar xf -

# or
$ tar -I pigz -xvf archive.tar.gz

-I is equivalent to --use-compress-program.

zip

Compress

$ zip -r archive_name.zip directory_to_compress

Extract:

$ unzip archive_name.zip

Trouble Shooting

Error

$ unzip *.zip
error: caution: filename not matched:

Solution

$ unzip \*.zip